Maven 2.2 Released, Versions Clarified

After a short hiccup with the distribution location, Maven 2.2.0 has been released and is appearing on most mirrors. John has blogged some details of the changes you can expect in the release. I’ve been using it (and the prior release candidates) daily without any issues, and it does provide some useful changes that make the upgrade worthwhile.

Though it was not a major release in terms of feature changes and fixes, it has helped in re-balancing the available Maven releases in a way that will hopefully be simpler to move forward with and easier to understand.

Maven has suffered for some time with confusion over the “2.1” version number – some projects still depend on pre-release code from early development on it that ended up not reflecting the 2.1.0 release at all. So along with good reasons to bump the minor version because of build-affecting changes and a firm requirement on Java 5 to run Maven, moving past the confusing version (which is also quite similar to 2.0.10, the other current release) is helpful.

As John has pointed out, 2.2.x is expected to be our stable branch going forward for the near future. We have been extremely paranoid about backwards compatibility between versions for some time, and now feel that we’ve reached a point where development can end on 2.0.x (either at the current 2.0.10 release or with a wrap-up 2.0.11 release that is under discussion).

So that leaves the active tracks as:

Maven 2.2.x – selective bugfixes on the stable release

Maven 2.3 – if new features for Maven 2 start being implemented, they will land here in the short term. No roadmap has been defined yet, but there are some open issues in JIRA that could be a starting point

Maven 3 – a backwards-compatible refactoring of the entire codebase – currently early alpha, developer only, to be released When It’s Done

All users should be able to upgrade to 2.2.0 from 2.0.x, with the small caveats that are documented in the 2.1.0 and 2.2.0 release notes (and if not, be sure to let us know!). So, if you are using Maven 2.0.x, give Maven 2.2.0 a spin!

Book

Coverage of intermediate Apache Maven concepts with a focus on best practices and "tying it all together". Significant coverage of automated build and repository management concepts, illustrated using Apache Continuum and Apache Archiva.